Here's the challenge: Eat for a week on $21 in food stamps

JOHN IWASAK, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By JOHN IWASAKI, P-I REPORTER

Published 10:00 pm, Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Claire West, left, who works for Food Lifeline, helps Sally Clark, a Seattle city councilwoman, as she tries to buy a week's worth of groceries for $21 -- or $1 a meal -- Tuesday at Fred Meyer in Ballard.
Photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

She gazed longingly at the organic apples but chose regular red delicious instead.

Missing from her shopping cart were her usual "bad habits": chips, salsa and frozen yogurt.

In their place were a package of marked-down chicken thighs, 10 pounds of potatoes, bulk oatmeal and brown rice, and store-label wheat bread and peanut butter.

Sally Clark embarked Tuesday on the Food Stamp Challenge, a one-week experiment to live on an average food stamp budget of about $21 a week -- $1 a meal -- in Washington.

"It's a great reminder of the struggles people do face," said Clark, a member of the Seattle City Council, as she exited the checkout stand at the Ballard Fred Meyer store. Clark went shopping with guidance from Claire West, a food-stamp recipient for the past nine months. West works for Food Lifeline, a non-profit food-distribution agency that issued the challenge to draw attention to hunger issues. National Hunger Awareness Day is June 5.

More than 26 million people in the U.S. received food-stamp benefits in 2006. Washington's 535,000 recipients usually can make their monthly allowance last only 2 1/2 weeks, leaving them to turn to food banks or feeding programs for the rest of the month, Food Lifeline officials said.

That means watching every food penny, something Clark wouldn't normally do while shopping for her normal $90 to $100 a week in groceries for herself and her partner.

"Anything crunchy and good for us is too expensive," she said while looking at organic broccoli and carrots.

Clark plans to participate in the challenge until Sunday. She spent $19.38, ending up with 15 items ranging from milk and romaine lettuce to cheddar cheese and canned black beans.

"She can work with that," said West, an AmeriCorps Vista volunteer. "It may not be what she's used to. That's part of the game."

The value of food-stamp benefits has eroded in the past decade because of federal welfare reform, said Linda Stone, Eastern Washington director of the Children's Alliance.

Food-stamp benefit levels are based on household income after non-food basic expenses are subtracted. The formula used to be adjusted to reflect cost-of-living increases in basic expenses. Welfare reform froze that adjustment. If inflation were taken into account, a typical family using food stamps -- a single parent with two children -- would be receiving about $24 more each month, Stone wrote in a report released this week by the Children's Alliance.

Even if benefit levels increased, a problem remains. Only about two-thirds of those eligible for food stamps in Washington receive them, including just 51 percent in King County, according to a national study that placed the Seattle area near the bottom of the participation list among urban areas.